It was a long run and I'm sure it felt like an eternity for many - for me it certainly did. PHP 5.3 was branched of over two years ago and finally is ready to be called 5.3.0.

The php.net website and many other blogs discuss the features - from often loved closures, to well discussed namespaces to the sometimes hated goto - so I think I don't have to this here but instead can focus on that what really matters:

Thanks to all the developers - Without them no new features would be there.

Thanks to the documentation team - Without them one would have to decipher the NEWS file and guess what exactly is meant.

Thanks to all participants during the Testfest! - During the Testfest we received many good tests for our regression test suite. Many of these tests represent what people do, not what developers think they should do which is important to reduce the risk of regressions. I hope people don't stop sending tests!

Thanks to all the testers who reported bugs, and to the ones who reported that their applications worked without issues! - Regression tests are important but many possible issues can only be found in real life scenarios with real applications.

Thanks to the whole community to make pressure on the developers to finally get it out as everybody is waiting for the new features.

And last, but certainly not least: Thanks to Lukas! - Handling developers who are passionate for their work can be tough. Lukas made sure that the developers focus on what really matters and really helped me with all the work needed

So with that: In case you didn't do already: Browse over to php.net and grab your copy, it's for free!

If you want to celebrate the release and are close to Munich: We're planing a PHP Release Party on July 17th, details on that will follow.

As allow of you will have read a namespace separator for PHP was chosen. The discussions lasted more than 3 years and yes, we know most of the reasons why the chosen one is bad and
Â§%Â§$&"& is way better before wasting your and our times by
writing to mailing lists please read the archives. 90% of the proposals
fail for simple technical reasons, 10% might technically work but have
other problems which were considered. So: Decision made, let's go on and let's make sure the
developer's list is there for doing productive stuff, 5.3 is delayed
enough.

End October - time for the traditional meeting of the German and International "PHP family" - end of October? - Yes, the International PHP Conference is a bit earlier this year. Additonally the organizers moved the conference away from the industrial area of MÃ¶rfelden to the center of Mainz which sounds quite promising. Although I'll spend only around 24hrs at Mainz I'm looking really forward to the conference next week.

On Thursday morning I'll give a presentation about PHP 5.3, which will be quite interesting as one of the biggest features, namespaces, is still undergoing heavy discussions and the final syntax probably won't be clear when presenting - fortunately PHP 5.3 is much more than namespaces!

Sun will also be present at the conference, so if you're looking for an open source PHP IDE you might talk to Petr and Wen about the upcoming NetBeans 6.5 release which will feature PHP support, if you're running a startup company you might talk to Stefan Schneider who will represent the Startup Essential Program which has interesting discounts on Sun products.

Unfortunately I won't be able to attend Brian Aker's keynote about Drizzle or Ulf's session about new and hot stuff in mysqlnd, one of the new feature in PHP 5.3.

Since a few hours we're having, thanks to Edin, Windows snapshots for the upcoming PHP 5.3 release. In combination with the latest sources from CVS everybody should be able to test the current state.

There are quite a few new features already committed to the CVS tree, some of them are documented in the NEWS file and READMEs in CVS, most of them have been commented on Planet PHP so I suggest searching there for more information and keep this list short:

Namespaces: A way to help you organizing your code.

Late Static Binding: Gives you the class name used when calling a static method.

Dynamic static calls: $c = "classname"; $c::someMetod();

Improved ini-handling: .htaccess file like per-directory configuration and much more

__callStatic magic method: similar to __call but for static calls

mysqlnd: a replacement for libmysql for better PHP-MySQL-Integration

getopt() on any platform (inclding windows)

...

As you can see there's lots of stuff which needs testing! The earlier bugs are found the earlier they can be fixed! In case you ever wondered how you could give back something to PHP (which you certainly should do) you might take a look at our test coverage reports to see which areas of PHP need more testing and provide additional tests. (See qa.php.net and Marcus's slides for an introduction to test writing) Having more tests is important for us - and you don't have to know much about PHP internals to write proper tests (sometimes it's even better to write black-box tests...)

But well, there's not only PHP 5.3: If you're interested in unicode you should certainly take a look at PHP 6 and if you're running older systems you should consider upgrading to the latest 5.2 release instead of waiting for PHP 5.3 - the stable release is not expected within this year and many things there can change till it's released.

And as a final note: Test the snaps as often as you can - generic tests can never cover all use-cases and - as said above - fixing regressions is harder after a release than during development. (And be warned: We won't take any complaints from people not testing in time)

Ilia recently published the probably final release candidate of the current stable tree: PHP 5.2.4RC2. The stable release can be expected soon. This release fixes quite some bugs from older versions and does a few minor adjustments. Please test the RC release so unexpected regressions can be detected and fixed before it's marked stable. If regressions and other problems aren't detected now it will take a few months till the next version will be released, so do your best to make sure it's worth being called stable! Please file found issues, after checking for other reports and the documentation, into the bug tracker. The recent trend to report bugs using blogs isn't working well!

In other news one could read that there were also some major improvements in the development of PHP 6 made: Next to all that Unicode related work which was made over the last months PHP got, due to Andrey, mysqlnd as PHP-optimized replacement for libmysql and, thanks to Dmitry's work, namespace support. So this weekend might be the perfect time for sending you're family visting other parts of the family, letting them sweat on some beach or having fun at some theme park - then you can sit down, relax, and, after testing PHP 5.2.4RC2, give that new stuff in PHP 6 a test.